Life, and the Universe ... Global warming? Evolution or Intelligent Design? Renewable energy or nuclear power? Science versus religion? Historical fact, or myth? Can time go backwards? A wide-ranging blog about the intriguing "basic questions" of life and the universe, focused not on the various topics themselves but rather WHAT THE QUESTIONS ARE and HOW THEY CAN OR SHOULD BE ANSWERED -- scientifically and rationally, or otherwise.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Climate change – debating the rattlesnake’s rattle

My aim with this Basic Questions blog is to encourage people to think “scientifically” and to ask the “right” questions. If you don’t ask the “right questions” then you can’t hope to come up with meaningful, dependable answers.

This applies to all walks of life. There are some issues such as the debate on AGW (anthropogenic global warming) where confusion and misinformation abounds, as highlighted for example by a recent post of mine A little bit of Carbon Dioxide? (the claim that only 3.4% of carbon dioxide, which is only 3.62% of greenhouse gases, is caused by human activity).

Let’s look at another claim by Burt Rutan (referring again to his PDF and this PowerPoint presentations). At slide 16 of the latter, he talks about dishonest presentation of information, such as the now famous (or perhaps infamous) “hockey stick” claims about global warming:

And at slide 16 he decries what he says is “data manipulation” – the apparent sleight-of-hand in doing away with the medieval warm period -- by the United Nation’s intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC):

And so on. There are so very many presentations available that you are likely to lose your way in the overabundance of pretty charts and different data “interpretations” or whatever you want to call them.

Apart from Rutan’s, and as just one other example, try battling your way through some of the presentations by The Global Carbon Project (GCP) such as The Carbon Budget 2007+ presented at CLIMATE CHANGE - Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions (Copenhagen, 10-12 March 2009).

UPDATE: Bill McKibben of 350.org says in Dissecting the sceptics (2) that "Very few people really want to change in any meaningful way, and given half a chance to think they don’t need to, they’ll take it" and “at bottom, that’s a battle as much about courage and hope as about data.”

Who’s “right” and who’s “wrong” about all this complicated stuff, if it can be put so simplistically? There’s dissension among even the climate science specialists, so how can non-specialists make sense of it all and come to logical conclusions about what can be done (if anything) to modify the climate changes?

There’s little doubt that there has been some warming during the last several decades, but my question this time is:

How significant is the present global warming trend in the very-long-term picture of global climate change?

What I’m getting at here is, if we try to estimate what has happened to the climate going back not just a few hundred years (such as the medieval period), but many thousands and even many millions of years, then what picture emerges (and how reliable is it)? It has been a lot hotter at times long ago (such as when there were green forests in what we now call Antarctica), as well as much colder during various ices ages.

Are the current temperature fluctuations, in comparison with with the totality of changes over the eons, like just the rattle on the rattlesnake’s tail?

Imagine that the snake represents climate changes going way back in time, and we’re positioned at the very tip of the rattle

Are we focussing too much on the rattle, warning sign though it is, rather than on the picture that emerges if we stand right back and look over the entire rattlesnake?

Is the tiny part of the historical global temperature graph just a “pimple on a pumpkin” and nothing more than a tiny squiggle at the very end of a curve that has had many ups and downs, some of them perhaps much larger than current variations?

I’m not sure, are you? What can and should we do, if anything, to avoid the rattlesnake’s bite?

2 comments:

I say that we put the global warming issue aside and start thinking about the direct effect on our health from us spreading toxic waste all around. Is there anybody claiming that breathing pollution is good for our health? I guess no. So then if we take care of that problem, we will solve any possible global warming problem without thinking about it.

Our mistake is being overly concerned about a "conclusive" answer as to whether mankind's activities are causing global warming. The real question is "Is there a possibility that mankind's activities can cause global warming?"If that posssibility exists...can we afford the risk? And,can we do anything about it.

About Me

Tony Austin ... Trained in science and engineering, still tend to approach life from a scientist's or engineer's viewpoint, but over the years have picked up skills in sales/marketing, journalism and other non-technical areas. Taught Chemistry / Math / Science in high schools. Joined IBM Australia in 1970, retired in 1995, since then have been an "independent consultant" [an oxymoron]. So now I have over four decades in the IT business, still enjoying it enormously - except, that is, for the same silly mistakes being repeated time and time again in function and interfaces, won't we ever learn? ... Decided to retire from IT consulting at end of 2013 after 44 years in the industry, closed Asia/Pacific Computer Services then, but am still regularly writing technology articles as an industry observer.